Staffing Industry Growth Projections 2019

Curious to explore what strategies, recruitment technology, tools and tactics support staffing growth in 2019 & beyond? You’re in the right place!  

After connecting with 188 staffing industry professionals and gathering a comprehensive list of insights, Avionté is proud to sponsor and present this year’s State of the Staffing Industry Growth Benchmarking Report.  

This report aims to answer one question, “What technology choices drive growth and what doesn’t in the staffing industry?”  

Having spent hours analyzing results and talking with experts, the report found three overarching trends for building out a growth-focused staffing and recruitment technology stack. They are:  

1. Faster is better: Firms that respond faster, grow faster.  
2. Intelligent automation is the future: As competition for talent tightens, the human touch matters more than ever. Fast-growth firms are automating repetitive tasks to give their recruiters time to build meaningful relationships.  
3. Trust matters as transparency increases: Talent is more informed than ever before, which means word of mouth marketing and reputation management are becoming increasingly important. 

Keeping these three themes in mind, let’s look at three specific findings that relate to staffing industry growth projections in 2019 from technology. We’ll dive into the data and offer our opinion. If you prefer to read the actual report vs our synopsis of it, please feel free to download the entire 2019 State of Staffing Industry Growth Report. 

Report finding:  

“Fewer firms expect to see fast growth this year, just 21% compared to the 2018 high of 36%” 

Our takeaway: This isn’t too surprising considering the record low unemployment rate and the fact that there are currently more jobs than job seekers. Staffing firms should focus on speed more than anything in order to achieve growth. That’s speed at finding qualified employees and speed at placing them in a suitable job. According to the report, one of the key opportunities to achieve speed is to “capitalizing on the latest technology and leveraging AI to quicken the recruiting lifecycle.” While that sounds a lot easier said than done, leveraging the right recruitment technology can have a significant impact on finding the right candidates, especially passive candidates.  

In short: Harnessing the right sourcing software can boost fast growth 

Report finding 

“Office/Clerical and Industrial staffing saw the lowest cost per hire, while Management –level and IT staffing saw the highest”  

Our takeaway – Again, these statistics aren’t too surprising, especially since IT staffing and recruiting firms generally have a higher cost per hire than clerical/light industrial firms. While there’s a plethora of technology that can help lower cost per hire, video interviewing is one of the “low hanging fruits” of placing talent faster and more cost-effectively. To start, live video interviews are 6X faster than phone interviews and more than half of candidates actually prefer live video interviews while only 34% prefer in-person.  

Bonus: Check out this one-minute video interviewing overview clip that shows a practical example of how texting and video interviewing drives efficiency in the recruiting process.  

In short: Lower your cost per hire by trying out video interviewing. 

Report finding:  

“Referral programs and LinkedIn ranked as the top recruiting tactics with the highest ROI” 

Our takeaway: Referral plans remain king, word of mouth and incentive programs are tried and true ways to bring ROI but they are also some of the easiest to measure. Many of the marketing related tactics like Facebook, AdWords and email are fantastic methods to bring in revenue but are often difficult to accurately track. If you’re unsure how to measure ROI on your various marketing tactics, give our blog, How to Measure ROI on Recruitment Marketing, a quick read.  

In short: Recruiting ROI tactics are imperative but it’s also important that you can accurately track them. 

The insights collected in this blog only represent a small fraction of the total amount of goodies from the whole report. Feel free (literally, it’s free!) to download the entire 2019 State of Staffing Industry Growth Report. We’d love to hear your opinions/takeaways.

About Avionté

Avionté is a leader in enterprise staffing and recruiting software solutions, offering innovative end-to-end staffing solutions to over 900 customers and 25,000 users throughout the U.S. and Canada. Avionté delivers a robust platform for clerical, light industrial, IT and professional staffing firms to maximize profits and boost productivity.